"If I may lend a machete to your intellectual thicket."
- Captain Jack Sparrow

Hello SitS fans...Scene in the Store is happy to announce that our sponsor, The Game Room, has hosted its first full fledged Magic event! So yeah we had our first real event at the store on Sunday, complete with promo cards and prize payouts. It was a great success and with that we'll jump right into why that matters...

Trepanation Blade OWNS FACE! More on this later...

Since this was the store's first event, and mostly unadvertised, I decided to mix things up a bit with the sealed deck event that we hosted. We offered 6 packs of any combination from New Phyrexia and Innistrad, and this made for some very interesting deck builds. The pack counts were widely varied from all 6 Innistrad to 5NPH/1ISD and everything in between. This little experience can provide us with several different points of interest.

* As I mentioned earlier, Trepanation Blade is insane in a sealed/limited environment! Now I know in other formats it loses some of its glint, but in sealed and/or limited format is where it's sharpest. This artifact kept a stable board presence no matter who or how they played it. All you drafters out there should remember this as well; in your little limited bubbles. This card has plenty of haters but all's fair in a sealed war...oh and if you can pull the foil...try not to drool on it before you sleeve it, it's gorgeous.

* It's interesting how many Stromkirk Nobles are actually cracked in the course of opening a booster box. It's like WotC knew that all the red mages were losing a bit of "off the line" speed when Zendikar rotated out and slipped this unsuspecting gem in to compensate.

* The Phyrexian mana cards are still super fun and super utilitarian. Mutagenic Growth, Vault Skirge, and Gitaxian Probe are still some of my favorite cards from the set. And let's not forget the popularity of Dismember and new all-star Gut Shot. I could see the entire Phyrexian mana group of cards becoming increasingly popular as time goes on and NPH rotates out. I've got a box dedicated to holding a fair number of play sets of each of these Phyrexian mana cards.

* One of the major things I think we can take away from this little experience is the fact that Innistrad appeared to be the stronger of the two sets. While New Phyrexia had some bomb cards that got cracked, it was the consistent strength of Innistrad that lead its major supporters to top spots in the final standings. With this in mind we can remember to aim towards packs of Innistrad when presented with options of sets to choose from. One for its immediate strength at any given sealed situation, and two for its strength in the trade realm.

* This "choose your own destiny" style of sealed deck was an interesting look into casual play styles. The success of this past Sunday's event has gotten me thinking of other ways to go about casual events. I've got an idea for some sort of "randomizer" tourney. An appropriate number of packs are put into a box, the players blindly pull a pack, pass to the left, and so on, until all players have their 6 packs. We'll explore these ideas more in future posts. I feel like events such as these will be great for testing players deck building skills, as well as providing a fresh approach to playing. Check out this article, if you haven't already...Horde Magic by Peter Knudson. If anyone else out there has come up with some other interesting casual events, please feel free to share in the comments below.

Ok folks, that wraps up this Tuesday's SitS post. I want to thank those of you that are supporting Scene In The Store and I look forward to providing you with lots of new material and outside-of-the-box perceptions on this game we have all come to know and love.

Keep on keepin' on being...Scene In The Store!